1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, a method and a computer program product for presenting information that provide information within an organization.
2. Description of the Related Art
The recent proliferation of computer networks has been increasing opportunities of using electronic means such as electronic mail and text databases as an information sharing means when workers of an organization are working in collaboration or communicating with each other. When adopting such an electronic information sharing means, however, information tends to be shared less smoothly than when discussing at a face-to-face meeting or consulting over the phone in a customary way. For instance, when communicating with an unfamiliar person or joining a project as a new team member, one may encounter a jargon (such as a technical term, document name, job name, and proper name) in a document or e-mail somebody has prepared, which makes it difficult to fully understand the content. On the other hand, a word that is used in one's document or e-mail may not be understood by the receiver.
As a method of sharing information in an organization, terminology and knowledge necessary at work or in communications may be compiled into a glossary that can be shared among the team members of the job to achieve smooth information sharing. However, compiling a glossary from scratch and updating the glossary by adding new entries creates a complicated task that requires manpower.
To solve the above problem, a technology called “know-who system” has been used. The know-who system in general includes a database of specialists (database of name and contact information as well as individual profiles of expertise) that is manually or automatically created. In response to a question input by a user on a term or the like, the system searches for a person whose profile corresponds to this question through the specialist database and introduces this person as a specialist who has knowledge about the question to the user.
Various modes have been suggested for the know-who system. For instance, JP-A 2001-117940 (KOKAI) discloses a technology of, instead of actively using a specialist database, searching through information such as documents prepared by different users in response to a question input by a user and providing the user with personal information extracted from the searched information as information on a specialist who has knowledge about the question.
Moreover, various methods have been suggested to automatically create user profiles, or in other words, information that indicates individual expertise and interests, which is usable in the know-who system or a conventional information filtering system.
JP-A 2000-113064 (KOKAI) also discloses a technology of obtaining user profiles. In this technology, for example, texts created or browsed by a user, and e-mails transmitted or received by the user are incorporated, and words with statistically significant frequencies of appearance are extracted from the text information of the texts and e-mails. These words are regarded as characteristic words that indicate expertise and interests of the user. The user profile is established by, for example, a vector expression of the words (where each word is a dimension of a vector, and a magnitude of the dimensional component is expressed by a value calculated from the frequency of appearance of the word in the text or the like). Furthermore, 2000-259529 (KOKAI) discloses a technology of actively creating a profile of each user in a specific group of users by using words characterizing the user.
When seeking an understanding of an issue of in an unfamiliar field, it often happens that the user actually does not recognize what the user oneself wants to know. In other words, the user is often unaware that there are things that the user does not know now but should know for the future works or communications. If this is the case, a technology using the know-who system as disclosed by JP-A 2001-117940 (KOKAI) or other references does not allow the user to input an appropriate search condition, nor does it bring to the user's attention that there is a term the user should look up on the know-who system in the first place. Furthermore, the user does not realize that a word or knowledge the user is familiar with is not understood by other users.
The technologies disclosed by JP-A 2000-113064 (KOKAI) and JP-A 2000-259529 (KOKAI) are intended for presentation of information on knowledge and interest of a user, and thus mutual relation with other users is not taken into consideration. For example, there is a problem that these technology do not make the user aware of terms that the user currently does not have knowledge of or interest in but may need to know in the future work or communications. Similarly, the user may be unaware that a term that the user has knowledge of or interest in is not understood by or not of interest of a partner of the job or communications.